


One More Time

by blueraspberrybubblegum



Series: Lift It Like It's Heavy [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff, Gen, STRIFE!, after the game, so that's what happened to dirk's head, striders sure have funny ways of showing affection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 10:52:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueraspberrybubblegum/pseuds/blueraspberrybubblegum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wake with a hand on your shoulder and two dark lenses – not yours – in your face. Maybe he said your name a second ago, maybe he said please, but what your waking mind hears are three words that don’t belong together, not in your ears, not from his mouth, not anymore.</p><p>“Bro. Roof. Now.”</p><p>Don't let the series bit scare you, this piece easily doubles as a one-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One More Time

**Author's Note:**

> If you're here independently of Lift It Like It's Heavy - welcome! All you need to know is that everyone lives together in a big house after the game, and the B2 kids never reached god tier.

You wake with a hand on your shoulder and two dark lenses – not yours – in your face. Maybe he said your name a second ago, maybe he said please, but what your waking mind hears are three words that don’t belong together, not in your ears, not from his mouth, not anymore.

“Bro. Roof. Now.”

“Nnngh. It’s two a.m., you asshole.”

“That’s right. Get up.”

“How about _no_.” His footsteps make their way to the door, which is the wrong thing to happen, because he never, ever gives up this easily. You sit up to watch him, to make sure he’s actually leaving, but no – the cocksucker’s just flipping on a light. The shape under the covers next to you buries her head under a pillow, whimpering in protest.

“You son of a bitch, you woke her up,” you grumble from the shade of a sheltering arm, your eyes squeezed to slits. Sixty is still way too many watts, what the hell, and what did you do to deserve this needy bitch for a brother? Bro is dead, he’s gone, that happened, and then three years later this guy shows up. There’s no place in your life for him – the hole that Bro left is scarred over – but he thinks he knows you and he claims you without a second thought and he’s got a tinny echo of Bro’s authority and a hole of his own that he needs to fill and you’re having the damnedest time saying no.

The room falls into darkness once more. “Two minutes,” Dirk’s shadow says, one hand on the doorknob. “Sorry, Jade.”

“Mmf,” she grunts back. Once he’s gone, she comes out of hiding to watch you lace up your Chucks, scratching idly at her shoulder through the neck of a threadbare flannel shirt that must have come from her grandpa’s wardrobe because it’s the kind of thing that no one under the age of fifty-five would be caught dead in. “When are you going to tell him you don’t want to fight anymore?” she asks you, blinking her black lashes sleepily.

“One more time. That’s it.” You cram on your glasses as soon as your face clears the neck of your shirt, already half out the door. If you make Dirk wait, he’s liable to come back and keep harassing you. Better to get it over with so you and Jade both can get back to sleep.

You stick your head back though the door for a parting apology. “It’s on him,” she yawns. With any luck, she won’t notice when you come back to bed.

* * *

Up on the roof of the Big House (that’s its name now, apparently. You tried to get “the Crib” to stick but Jade thought you were talking about the place you store corn and Jake thought you meant the thing that babies sleep in and the trolls just didn’t get it so it never caught on), it’s crystal clear and colder than you ever wanted air to be. You’re still glad you didn’t bring a jacket – it would only end up on the ground once you work up a sweat. Dirk’s position, staring off into the darkness, is silhouetted by the red moon, which drenches the rooftop in dull, bloody shadows. In this light his eyesight won’t be any better than yours.

Not that you need an advantage. Half-blind, two inches shorter and twenty-five pounds lighter with a podunk broken piece of shit blade in your hand, and you still lap him like he’s standing still. It’s not fun anymore. How are either of you supposed to get anything out of strifing if he won’t even give it a fucking college try?

Good. He heard you come up.

You’re on him in a second, sword flashing to his neck, but he gets his weapon up to block just in time, glowering in a manner you could only describe as petulant. You’re already gone. He’s too slow.

He tries to block again, whirling around to catch you when you step behind him, but your second step takes you to his blind side, where you flick him a slap on the wrist with the flat of your blade before he can catch up. The wind from his errant swing flattens your shirt, but that’s as close as it gets.

The key to fighting Dirk is not to engage, because what you can’t win is a contest of strength. Let him swipe at your ghost. Sooner or later he’ll overextend himself, and if you can get inside the reach of his arms when that happens, he can’t touch you.

He’s catching on, learning to predict where you’ll be. It’s harder to get close enough than it once was, now that he knows he has to keep you at arm’s length if he doesn’t want a haircut. The first time you saw him don his Stetson was the morning after you managed to shave off a three-inch hank over his right ear. These days the hat is a permanent fixture – he hasn’t bothered with gel in over a month.

Maybe he ran out? What a crying shame. His hair will finally join the rest of you trapped under gravity’s thumb. It’s a fucking dance party under here, cool kids only, and Striders are at the top of the guest list. John, who’s too dumb to figure out he’s not supposed to be able to fly anymore – he’ll be bounced at the door, plus Aradia with her butterfly wings. Actually, those things are rad as shit, she can totally come to your exclusive earthbound disco as long as she’s down to ridicule John for riding a lame-ass tornado.

Damn it, Jade can probably still fly too. Maybe even your sister, though she did swear off that eldritch possession crap a while back. Fuck it, you’ll just have to uninvite Egbert on principle.

The game takes you across the flat part of the rooftop and up an incline where two slopes converge. Up on the ridge of the roof, you’re confined to moving in one dimension, forward and back, unless you want to break your leg somersaulting off the steep tiles. You find yourself being driven backwards, the only direction you can go to avoid the long edge of his katana without locking blades. That’s not going to happen until you’re ready to be a Dave-shaped pizza, because the ground is fifty feet away and even you aren’t that stupid.

Your Chucks serve you well up here, letting you almost grip the narrow ledge with your feet as you twist out of his reach. In contrast, his stiff soles force him to balance perfectly parallel to the ridgeline, which hampers his attack: he can only swing from the shoulders, not the hips, and he needs to plan a step ahead if he wants to switch his leading foot. Were you always so conscious of tactical advantage? Who the fuck knows. If it’s a perk of being a Knight, well, it feels as natural and facile as breathing – but it could just as easily be a skill acquired from years of training against someone twice your size.

Both of you know this rooftop like the back of your hand, so when you feel the heat of the chimney against your heels you don’t hesitate to hop backwards onto its waist-high rim and launch yourself at your brother’s face.

He ducks, watching you soar over his head with a grim expression. Thank god he does, because out here over the north wing of the house there’s nothing to break your fall but rocky outcroppings. You hit the peak behind him, skipping forward three or four steps, but you still manage to reverse your momentum before he can straighten up and get himself turned around. When he does, going up on his toes to swivel one-eighty, like a dancer, he uses the motion to power a one-handed sweep at chest level. Crouching to slide under it is child’s play – he’s not even aiming, just trying to keep you back while he finds his bearings. The fight ends abruptly with your elbow at his windpipe and the splintered tip of your sword jammed in the hollow at the base of his throat. Your hand is cramping around the freezing hilt.

“Uncle,” he says dryly, eyeing you through his shades. His breath makes puffs of steam that glow red in the moonlight, like brimstone. You turn, putting away your sword, equally disappointed and relieved that it’s over so quickly, but you catch movement at the corner of your eye – he’s bringing his katana to bear once more. In a flash, you’ve hooked an ankle behind his and knocked him back with a double-handed shove. He hits the chimney, flailing for purchase against the bricks as one bootheel goes flying out from under him.

“Shit,” he says a little shakily, crouched and clinging to the blade in one hand and the metal-plated lip of the chimney with the other. He takes your proffered hand, fingertips blistered pink from the hot metal and one nail torn to the quick and bleeding freely, though the gloves mostly saved his knuckles.

The two of you pick your way back along the peak’s edge to the corner where it’s safe to skate down the tiles to the level part of the roof. You settle yourself against the foot of the gable next to the stairwell door, and Dirk huddles next to you, hip to hip, removing his hat to scrub the sweaty hair underneath.

“You’re too fast,” he says at last, like it’s your fault he can’t win. Like he dragged you out here tonight to talk about your problems instead of his own. Asshole.

“Hey, man, I don’t know what to tell you. We agreed no powers.” Not that you need to bend time to be quick – flashstepping is a skill you earned the hard way, in blood and sweat, and from him, no less. Of course, his aspect doesn’t lend him much of an advantage in a strife anyway, so the handicap really only applies to you. You wonder if he’d be more formidable if he had ever reached god tier.

Well, he’s still a Strider; he probably kicked so much ass on his way out of the womb that they had to evacuate the hospital staff. Not that any of you sprang from anything as mundane as a fucking _womb_. No man born of woman, and all that shit. Dirk’s a complete badass when he’s sparring with the trolls – he doesn’t hold back against them, not like he does with you – and his kata are things of such power and beauty that you set them to music so you could remember how he moves when his mind isn’t trussed to the flogging jut ( _get out of my fucking head, Terezi_ ). What you don’t enjoy is seeing him humiliate himself, not the way he enjoys it, embracing it without shame, like humiliation is his birthright, like the only difference between a kiss and a kick is where they land. He lives in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, telling himself that tomorrow he’ll be harder, better, faster, stronger – but tomorrow’s fixed firmly to the horizon and he never manages to measure up to your expectations, much less his own.

It’s disappointing, meeting your brother like this, human after all. You see yourself when you look at him, your pride and your defensiveness, and what you don’t see is Bro’s inscrutable, effortless cool. His fucking epic _nonchalance_. Your big brother, your childhood hero, your nemesis, has been cut down to size, and every time he loses a strife it feels like a meager and unfitting tribute to his original copy. Physically, they’re identical, but somehow the wiring got fucked up in Dirk’s brain. Was it the game that made him short circuit? Was it Jake, his turd of an ex-boyfriend, or did he just come that way, like a reboot from a corrupted file?

Night after night he batters himself against you like a bird at a plate window, hoping that the glass will shatter and he’ll finally be home free in the wild blue yonder. _Well, the sky’s behind you, brother dear, and I’m just your reflection. Everything I am came from you_.

A sigh sends contrails of vapor that dissolve around the level of his chest. He tugs his knees up under his chin, balancing the katana across the toes of his boots. “What am I doing wrong?”

“You need to be attacking, dope, you’re flapping around like a drunken chicken trying to block when you should be the one coming at me. Speed won’t do shit for me if I’m too busy dodging to fuck with you, and you’re not actually that slow so you need to quit acting like it. And the boots are a liability, dog, what do you think this is, _Bonanza_?”

Dirk frowns down at them. “I like these boots.” He squeezes his eyes shut, his face the picture of discontent. “I didn’t mean the boots, damn it. I meant, why do I feel so fucking hardwired? I’m a cog in the machine, teeth meshed in a steel frame. Autonomous entities give me inputs and I just grind out an answer by reflex like a dumb animal. I’m supposed to be the user, not the fucking mainframe!” His mouth twists bitterly. “My highrise was my demesne.  How the hell am I supposed to be in control of my own life when none of us can even turn around without pushing each other’s buttons?”

“Fuck, man, those entities are called ‘people,’ and that’s what they do, they think for themselves. You can’t make their moves for them. All you can do is deal with your own shit.”

“I can’t get a handle on my own shit when I’m tripping all over theirs. Why can’t they keep it private and out of my fucking way?” He grits his teeth. “It’s so loud here I can’t hear myself think half the time.”

Too loud? The night is silent and still, except for the pair of you. You know what he means, though: too crowded. Too in-your-face. Dirk’s personal space has a radius of two thousand miles, and anyone closer is stepping on his toes, whether he lets on or not. He populated his little realm with constructs, iterations of himself, and to him you’re either _self_ or _stranger_ , there’s nothing in between. Well, he’s got to let somebody close sometime. Maybe starting to talk about it means he’s almost ready to make it happen.

You just don’t think that “somebody” is going to be you.

“Let me tell you what’s too fucking loud. Cicadas, man.”

“Cicadas?”

“Sure, cicadas.” You stretch your legs out momentarily, shifting your weight to get more comfortable. “They’re these gigantic bugs with bulging red eyes and dragonfly wings. Look like mutant grasshoppers. They crawl out of the ground and set up the loudest fucking racket you ever heard. All through the end of summer, as long as the weather stays hot and dry, you can hear ‘em buzzing – even in the middle of the city they’ll drown out the traffic. It gets into your head. Sometimes when the wind was right I could even hear them from the roof of my building, singing for a mate.”

You let out a breath, watching the patterns in the fog as it dissipates, and reflect that present tense stings less than past tense. Maybe Houston’s still sizzling away in some dead-end timeline.

“Every year, for the whole month of August, the city becomes a goddamned insect bordello.”

For a moment, Dirk mulls this over, and you take the opportunity to inch your shivering self closer to him. It’s too fucking cold to be out here bullshitting around.

He tersely orders you to tell him more about Houston. This is the puppetmaster in him, and it, at least, is familiar. Looking back, you realize that Bro pulled your strings too, molding you into the shape he wanted you to be. He was always proudest of you when you managed to parrot him perfectly. Well, Dirk is going to learn soon enough that treating other people like extensions of himself is not going solve his agoraphobia. He has to let his friends have their agency, even if it means they’re dragging their shit all over him. He’ll just have to fucking deal.

As you think about what you want to say, you rock your head back against the gable and focus your aching eyes on the blurry, rusty moon. Its reflected light reminds you of the glow of LOHAC, all smoldering coals and hot ash.

“When a storm blows in off the Gulf, the surge backs up into the bayous and floodwaters spill over into the streets. There’s train tracks crisscrossing the city, right, but to cut corners they dug trenches under the railways for the roads to run through instead of elevating all of the tracks, so when Houston floods these little dips in the road turn into deathtraps because people try to drive through them without realizing how deep the water is. Before you know it, the whole city’s gridlocked because a couple of jerks are too stubborn to turn their fucking huge-ass pickup trucks around. You know what they do instead of fixing it?”

He bites. “What do they do?”

“Buy bigger trucks.”

He smirks at that. “Everything’s bigger in Texas.”

“Damn straight.” You drag your fingers through the gravel bed, making five little furrows, and for a moment the only sound is the noise of the little stones.

“Have you ever driven a truck?” he asks.

“Are you kidding me? I could barely see over the dash of Bro’s Silverado, dude. That thing was a monster.”

“Can’t drive, can’t ride a bike. What kind of brother are you?”

 _I’m not supposed to be the older one_ , you want to tell him. “I can teach you how to swim.”

“I already know how to swim. I grew up in the middle of the fucking ocean.”

“I can kick your ass eight ways to Sunday.”

“You can kick my ass,” Dirk repeats, and falls silent, his eyes fixed on the stars wheeling overhead. His breathing is slow and even, like he’s sleeping. You scoot another centimeter closer. The cold, lumpy gravel is making your butt numb, but at least your arm is warm where it’s wedged up against his.

“Oh, I nearly forgot. I have something for you,” he says, flipping through his sylladex and summoning from it a smooth, round, ivory-colored object that he deposits in your hands. “Someone told me you like dead things.”

“Holy shit!” You run your fingers across the sutures, hook a thumb through one orbit. The teeth are slick and hard and not quite straight, and they make a clicking noise when you tap your fingernails against them. The jaw’s held on with discreetly hidden wire loops. “Is it real? Where did you get it?”

“It’s mine,” he answers, like that should be sufficient explanation. “I found it in Jake’s room when I was cleaning.”

“And you took it without telling him. How fucking domestic of you.”

“Shut your mouth, asshole. I traded three months of chores for the behemoth hide he brought home. I’m making a duster out of it, it’s almost done.”

“A duster, like… a big, Old West trenchcoat thing.” He nods, all pleased with himself, and you take in his Stetson and his heeled boots and his completely self-enforced Texan drawl and realize two things:

  1. Your brother, Dirk fucking Strider, is going full-on, 100% USDA Prime brokeback cowboy; and
  2. He will never, ever, ever understand why it’s so exquisitely ironic. Hah!



He adds, “I didn’t steal it, bro, it actually belongs to me. I let Jake hold onto it for a little while, but he wasn’t doing anything with it. It was just sitting under his bed collecting spiders. Waste of a good skull, if you ask me.”

“Okay, but seriously, where did you even get a human skull in the first place?”

“Dude. _It’s mine._ ” He bares his teeth at you. At first you think he’s trying to force a smile, and it’s completely grotesque… and then it clicks. You look at the grinning skull, at your brother’s grimace, and back at the skull. Then you nearly fumble the damn thing.

“Christ, don’t drop it, you jackass!” He juggles it back to you.

“That is macabre as _shit_. How..?” _How did you get yourself decapitated_ , you want to ask, but then your brain is invaded by the image of someone – probably Jake, who are you even kidding – kissing Dirk’s bloody, bodiless face to revive him, and you decide that you actually don’t want to know.

“It’s a long story. But it was pretty fucking awesome. I’ll tell you another time.” Great, now you’re not going to be able to get out of it.

Squicky kisses notwithstanding, being the custodian of your brother’s very own memento mori is a job that’s almost too epic, even for you. You didn’t save anything from your own dead alts. Who wants to be reminded of all the times they died?

You mentally add +2 Badass Points under the Dirk column. “I can’t take this,” you tell him.

He fends off your attempt to shove it back at him. “C’mon. I’m not using it. You’ll get more enjoyment out of the thing than I will.”

“Alright, then… let me give you something.” Setting his skull safely on the ground, you fan out your own sylladex, scanning through the pictures for the card you have in mind.

“Here you go. It’s a Nikon 35mm SLR.” He hefts it in one hand, getting a feel for how its weight is distributed, heavier in the back than the front. “It’s a film camera, see?” You show him how to open the empty panel in the back.

“Do you already know how to work a digital camera?” Dirk nods wordlessly, his eyes glued to the tiny numbers printed on the dials. “Okay, well, it’s pretty much the same except you have to manually adjust the focus and exposure. This one controls the shutter speed,” you thumb the knob, “and you turn these to change the aperture and focus.”

He lifts the camera, points it at you, and messes with the settings. Then he snaps a picture.

“Cool,” he whispers reverently.

“I’ve got a pile of film back on LOHAC, and developer and crap like that. I’ll show you how to use the lab. Once you run out of that shit, you’re done, so don’t waste it. But _use_ it.”

“What about you?” Replacing the lens cap, he cradles the camera in his lap with both hands, and you silently congratulate yourself for rocking it in the Excellent Decisions category today.

“Eh. It’s kind of a pain to squint through the viewfinder anymore. I haven’t gotten any use out of it since my eyes started going to shit. I won’t miss it.” You pick up the skull, balancing it on your palm all _alas, poor Yorick_ (shit. lets be shakespeare) and open your mouth to thank him, but he’s turned away, busy captchaloguing his belongings.

He stands to stretch and pulls you to your feet when he’s done. You stow the skull carefully away. You already know where it’s gonna go when you get back to your room.

“Are you up for another round?”

“Let’s do this.” You’re too amped to sleep right now. You’d think it was Christmas or something.

He levels his katana in your direction, the sheath gripped in his left hand, and you’re off. Within fifteen seconds he’s got a cut along his jawline, you have a throbbing welt on your shoulder, and his sheath is flying in a majestic arc to disappear off the edge of the roof. Dirk chases after you across the rooftop, pebbles scattering under his boots. He’s still slow but lighter on the footwork, making you work to catch him off guard, and this time he doesn’t let you draw him up to the peak. You come face to face at the brink of the roof, where you run out of room to dodge. Cornered, he knows you have to get past him to attack – you know he knows, but you don’t have a choice – so when he shifts his weight like he’s going left, you step the other way, right into his fucking blade.

Time seems to slow as the katana descends. It seems to slow because it is slowing, because somewhere in your brain you hit a panic button and told the world to sit tight for a second while you get your shit together. Just like you said you wouldn’t. Fuck.

The sword’s silvery surface reflects the image of your shades, and in that reflection you can see the barest hint of two wide, flicking eyes overlaid with a second, smaller sword, a hall of mirrors recursion that drops off into infinity. Dirk’s face is lowered; from this angle, his own shades are opaque. He’s still as a statue, not even breathing. You take stock, trying to find a way out of this without breaking the rules any more than you already have. One half of one blade, held at waist level, too low to bring up in time. One sword arm too weak to parry even if you could. One pair of one-of-a-kind shades that won’t do you any fucking good at all. One skinny neck bared for the kill. And infinite replays, assuming you die doing something stupid.

You could just walk away, robbing him of the victory he’s earned a thousand times over, but what kind of brother would you be then?

Sighing, you resign yourself to your fate, yet a-fucking-gain. _So much for no more dead Daves_ , you think, and close your eyes, and set the globe spinning once more.

The razor edge doesn’t stop until it touches your neck. But it does stop. Dirk’s predatory grin softens to something more childlike as you stare at each other.

“I cheated,” you tell him, feeling the blade dig into your throat as it gives voice to your confession.

“But you let me beat you anyway.”

“I didn’t let you do shit, Dirk, you won the match fair and square.”

He shines with triumph, but even though your heart is bursting with adrenaline and – pride? – your face is an emotionless mask. The contrast strikes you. Bro didn’t smile when he beat your ass to a pulp. He didn’t yell at you when you got a D in History because you didn’t want to write a paper about the fucking Alamo. He didn’t laugh at your comics or ask for copies of your music. He was a cartoon caricature, and you wanted to be just like him; you let him imprint himself on every part of you, starting with your fucking poker face. Bro gave you his face along with everything else you inherited: his speed, his wordplay, his specibus, his utter contempt for candid speech. Not Dirk. Honesty is just another layer of irony for him, and while he can pull a stony look with the best of them, he never needed to school his expression in self-defense.

The guy in front of you, the one who belongs at a scratch-and-dent sale, the one who’s at least trying to be a real human being – he’s the real Dirk Strider. He’s not the guy who raised you, the guy you emulated and adored and feared, but maybe he doesn’t have to be Bro to be your brother.

“Sorry I can’t tell you how to drive, dog, but at least I can teach you how to use a real camera. And why don’t you talk to Jade? She’d love to show you how to ride a bike, dude.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll do that.” He twists his neck to look at you out of the corner of his eye, under the rim of his sunglasses. His eyes glimmer red-gold in the rusty light. “See you tomorrow night?”

You groan at the thought. You’ve got a knot in your shoulder the size of a softball and your hands are frozen into gargoyle claws. You’ve already lost two hours of sleep tonight and you’re going to have to sneak back into your own bed without changing if you don’t want to wake up your girlfriend.

The same girlfriend you’re going to tell, in morning, why you can’t give up your midnight strife brodates just yet.

“Fuck yeah. Tomorrow.”

Stowing his weapon, he gives you a fierce grin, and he really does look like Bro, only Bro never smiled like that. You do your best to throw it back at him. Maybe you were wrong to think your brother had nothing left to teach you, now that the playing field between you is level.

_Hell. Fucking. Yes._

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr! [blueraspberrybubblegum](http://blueraspberrybubblegum.tumblr.com/)
> 
> If you came here from Lift It Like It's Heavy: [Back to Chapter 12](http://archiveofourown.org/works/686370/chapters/1461911) | [Onward to Chapter 13](http://archiveofourown.org/works/686370/chapters/1827648)
> 
> Reference counts: ReBoot - 1; Shakespeare - 2; Daft Punk - I lost count
> 
> Theme for Dave and Dirk: ["Alive 2007" - Daft Punk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeqlkEymQ94) (The whole album. I am not ashamed.)


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